Every so often I have this urge (maybe more of an itch) to spend hours and hours on the web trying to find information about old, obsolete computers of the past. I am intrigued by the XEROX Alto and Star ('70s-'82), the Apple Lisa ('83) and, of course, CRAYs ('75-ish). These were revolutionary machines indeed, they wrote golden pages in the history of computing. In the end of the 1980s, a new innovative product was ready to ship, created by a bunch of people coming from Apple: The NeXT platform.

Hank, your price comparison is unfair. The first NeXT in 88 was not really meant to be mainstream, but for education and developers. The real coming of NeXT into the market was at the end of 1990 when they released their second generation hardware ( they were the first 68040 based computers). Now, do a price comparison at that time with Mac systems or other UNIX workstations. NeXT were much much cheaper than all comparable systems.